“Puppy. Fried chicken. Puppy. Fried chicken. Aw, what a cute puppy!” A small group of people huddled together in a corner of an MIT classroom. As I rattled off proclamations of puppy-or-not-puppy, one fellow solver stared intently at the 20×20 grid of pictures to check my work while a third typed numbers into a grid to record our findings. The image were divided into four quadrants of images likely to fool deep learning algorithms: pictures that resemble fried chicken, pictures that resemble mint ice cream, pictures that resemble croissants, and pictures that resemble blueberry muffins.

The puzzle we were working on was one of the most adorable puzzles from the MIT Mystery Hunt. The puzzle hunt takes place in mid-January of every year…but opportunities to tackle challenging puzzles mean fans of the genre are rarely found wanting for puzzle experiences.

The MIT Mystery Hunt 2018: Head-HuntersEvery year, the Mystery Hunt embraces a new theme to provide the narrative structure for a weekend of puzzling in an experience designed by the winners of the previous year’s hunt. This year, Death & Mayhem turned to the Pixar film Inside Out for inspiration, asking puzzle hunt teams to get Miss Terry Hunter’s emotions under control so she could guide her team to victory, rediscovering many of the formative memories that led to her becoming a puzzle solver in the first place.

It’s relatively easy to experience the MIT Mystery Hunt remotely. Most challenges are delivered through an online website that progressively expands as teams unlock new puzzles, and the increasingly theatrical kickoff event that introduces players to the year’s theme is livestreamed.

But while the MIT Mystery Hunt creates an accessible experience for people solving off-campus, celebrating real world challenges and interactions is a core tenet of the Hunt. For instance, to complete the Pokémon round of puzzles, a small group from our team went to visit the “Safari Zone”, a classroom littered with dozens of Voltorb balls with five different sets of words written on them. After locating every ball, they noticed that one Voltorb in each group didn’t belong, giving them the combination lock password to obtain the bittersweet memory of Terry capturing her first Magikarp.

This year’s Hunt was strongest when it played with that line between digital and analog puzzles, exemplified by the paired puzzles Twitch Plays Mystery Hunt and Under Control. In Twitch Plays Mystery Hunt, teams were given a relatively simple video game to explore. The only catch: just like its namesake Twitch Plays Pokémon, each team was only given one avatar to control. After completing Twitch Plays Mystery Hunt teams unlocked Under Control, sending one member of their team to stand in front of a green screen for a livestreamed ninja dance battle. In order to defeat a series of ninja warriors the tribute had to be guided like a human puppet through a series of poses, with team communication managed by a synthesized voice reading out time delayed comments in the livestream.

The puzzle hunt finale returned to that same theme, with teams playing a modified version of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes by taking over the Emotional Command Center and following printed instructions to guide an overtired Terry Hunter through the MIT campus to the final location, solving the Hunt.

Other puzzles that are worth checking out include Marked Deck (a deck of laser-cut cards that, when properly arranged, provides a hint to the next step of the puzzle), Do You Want A (a puzzle that will be very familiar to people who know what MBMBAM stands for), Space Sounds TV (a puzzle about the history of spaceflight), A Pub Crawl (a very social drinking puzzle), and Special Delivery (a puzzle about musical mixes).

It’s Boxing Day! The day when thoughtful gifts from friends, family, and coworkers are exchanged for store credit, and when you start planning on how to convert that stack of gift cards into even more presents. Something to consider for puzzle fans: the escape room in a box.

Comparing escape rooms in a box against their traditional escape room counterparts is a bit like comparing a theatrical performance with its cinema adaptation. Paying a premium to see a performance of West Side Story live delivers an experience that can’t be completely translated to film, and attempts to directly lift the experience will make that absence noticeable. However, in the hands of the right team, cinematic adaptations can do things that would be impossible on a live stage. This article explores how three different companies brought their own particular spins on bringing the escape room genre home.

Simulacra Games is selling a crate of 1930s era memorabilia from the early days of animation for a studio that never existed. It’s not an elaborate counterfeiting scheme, but rather an elaborate alternate reality game in a box called The Wilson Wolfe Affair. Using the diary of a studio animator as a guide, players are guided through the crate’s exquisitely crafted materials artifacts by the diary of a studio animator to uncover the mysteries behind the Wilson Wolfe cartoons.

The Kickstarter campaign for The Wilson Wolfe Affair ends December 21st at 10AM EST, and the team has already blown past all their stretch goals, with almost a thousand backers raising over $210K in pre-orders for the experience. This level of support is particularly impressive for Simulacra Games’ first foray into the world of puzzle boxes, and can be a craftily executed promotional campaign designed to showcase the team’s skills without revealing any of the mysteries of the experience itself.

Wilson Wolfe and the Animated SeriesPrior to launching their Kickstarter campaign, Simulacra Games released a series of videos that served as an introduction to Wilson Wolfe, Jinks Studio’s version of Felix the Cat. For the first two videos, Wilson Wolfe’s adventures are framed in actual animated shorts. Mad Scientist Wilson highlights a restrained Wilson Wolfe struggling against his bonds as a shadowy figure approaches, while The Spooky Salesman shows Wolfe chased down a hallway by a spectral gloved hand.

Madame Daphne’s Tarot Reading Room and Séance Parlor is hard to find without assistance, hidden away in a Houston artist’s studio. An invitation from Madame Daphne herself provides instructions through the former rice packaging plant’s stark white interior to the medium’s lair, its lavish decor making it feel like a room out of place. Stepping over the threshold begins a 90 minute experience that tells a tale of deception, magic, and love spanning almost a century.

Strange Bird Immersive’s production The Man From Beyond thrusts 4-8 players into a supernatural adventure that combines a masterfully crafted escape room themed around Harry Houdini with an immersive theater performance to frame the experience, set within the walls of Madame Daphne’s parlor.

An Immersive Theater SandwichThe Man From Beyond‘s fictional narrative starts the minute players step into the room, as Madame Daphne greets her guests with a dramatic flourish. All the standard onboarding activities of an escape room are wrapped up into the context of the room, with a flair for the dramatic. The requisite waivers are still signed, but are done through the narrative conceit of the séance. Players are presented with the rules for the experience through a series of photographs in the hallway leading to the séance parlor, illuminated by candlelight. The séance itself sets the stage for the escape room portion, setting the narrative context for players when they take over the story’s agency.

Once the room’s clock starts ticking, the room transforms from séance parlor into a standard escape room. In a room surrounded by Houdini’s tools of the trade, players must tackle a century-old mystery on a deadline. At key milestones in the experience, micro-moments of theatrical exposition serve as narrative cut scenes, serving the dual purpose of rewarding player’s progress through the puzzle portion and reminding players of their broader purpose in the room. Solving a major puzzle might unlock information about Houdini’s wife Bess’ previous efforts to speak to her dead husband.

Most room escape games leave little room for telling a narrative that exists outside the room’s theming. A room based around an archaeological dig might hide some of its puzzles in a dig site and draw upon those themes to inform its puzzles, but a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is required to tackle the room’s challenges. Even rooms that try to adhere to their own internal narrative consistency stick to a bare-bones plot due to the realities of room design. Players must often split themselves up into continually shifting groups to divide and conquer in the most efficient way possible. While this tactic is highly effective at uncovering a room’s secrets, it forces players to experience the room’s narrative in a disjointed fashion. Players might all be aware they’re escaping from a jail cell, but the specifics of their escape route might only be known to a few participants, on a need-to-know basis. This challenge is exacerbated in the final minutes of a room, as teams scramble to put together the final pieces needed to escape. Often, escape room operators’ explanations at the end of the room are as necessary to explain the accomplishments of teammates as they are to highlight overlooked puzzles and clues.

The Man From Beyond addresses that problem by explicitly carving out time outside the escape room’s unforgiving countdown to allow players time to take in the story. Every player is aware of what they’re doing because they experienced the introduction together, before the clock started ticking. Every player knows the main narrative beats because the information is broadcast to the group at key moments. And the grand finale can be fully experienced since it takes place after escaping the room, removing any time pressures that might otherwise cause players to gloss over the story.

Because Strange Bird Immersive created space for players to breathe and take in the narrative, it stopped the puzzles from overwhelming the game’s powerful narrative themes. During my team’s playthrough, we made it through the puzzles at a steady clip, but were so moved by the bittersweet tale that few of us made it out through the full experience without shedding a few tears along the way. It wasn’t just that the story was pulling on our heartstrings. It was knowing everything that happened was because of our actions.

Late last week, I received a package in the mail from Sledged Infant Records, featuring a double EP of acid wave music. You’ve probably never heard of it before, but the genre of music is typified by its “fuzzy mix of psychedelia, funk, jazz, synthesized electronica, and whole-band improvisation from eccentric artists cranking out dope tracks in relative obscurity. The A-Side of the cassette featured music from GERTRUDE, 75-year old twin sisters out of Minnesota that mix electro dance rhythms and classical music with samples from film and television. The B-Side highlighted the works of Space Butter – recently deceased band leader Henry Wilson explicitly insisted that his works never be released, but in the words of the label, “this shit’s too good for your beyond-the-grave anxiety to stop.” If this kind of thing’s your jam, Sledged Infant Records runs an exclusive, ultra-secret mailing list for the most discerning of acid-wave fans. Oh also, the world may be coming to an end.

The acid-wave music genre doesn’t exist, Sledged Infant Records isn’t real, and the world isn’t actually coming to an end. But that didn’t stop Atlanta-based creative production company The Prudent Mariner from mixing together an hour-long cassette of acid-wave music, and offering a follow-up mix tape compiling the history of the non-existent genre for sale on their non-existent label’s website. The biographies and discographies on the Sledged Infant Records site paint a vivid picture of the colorful personalities who came together to create a music scene spanning almost four decades. And something is very, very wrong in this alternate universe. To understand, let’s fully unpack what I received in the mail.

On July 8th, Hello Games will run a radio advertisement on at least one of Howard Stern’s Sirius channels, stations 100 and 101. The radio spot won’t be promoting the company’s game of interstellar exploration, No Man’s Sky…at least, not directly. Instead, if past ads are any indication, it will serve as a signal to the game’s fans that the website of yet another fictional company has unlocked, delving deep into the game’s lore as part of the alternate reality game Waking Titan.

From Hype Machine to Stealth Launches
When the video game No Man’s Sky launched last August, it was prefaced by over three years of hype, showcasing the game’s flexibility in creating an entire universe of procedurally generated worlds, promising an unprecedented sandbox for exploration and discovery. The game’s bold promises encouraged half a million players to load up the game on launch day, although many fans left disappointed when comparing the promised release against its reality. Pre-release hype promised gamers the moon, the stars, and everything in between, and the version of the game that shipped failed to measure up to those expectations.

Over the next year, Hello Games took a considerably more measured approach to the No Man’s Sky‘s major updates seeking to bridge the expectation gap for the game’s dedicated fans. News of the game’s free Foundation and Path Finder updates were only announced a week before the versions went live, helping to add greater depth to the game’s almost zen-like gameplay of planetary hopping. The communications strategy around the game’s relatively frequent updates fit well with the overall tone of the game, with its gradual discovery process.

As a game, No Man’s Sky is a plodding journey of revelation, as the player’s character gradually builds a vocabulary to understand the three other intelligent species that populate the game’s universe. Understanding the Gek, the Korvax, and the Vy’keen and their troubled history with the enigmatic planetary guardian Sentinels only leads to the game’s broader mystery: what is Atlas, and what is your character’s relation to it? The game provides partial answers to these questions. It’s here that Waking Titan makes its entrance.

Cassette Tapes and Radio Broadcasts
Last month, Hello Games reached out to the moderators for the game’s subreddit to distribute a series of six numbered cassette tapes– installments in a 16 cassette series. Messages hidden in the spectrograms of each tape spell out the word “PORTAL”, hinting at one of the game’s main enigmas: a series of monoliths located on certain planets within the game with portals reminiscent of Stargate, with no Daniel Jackson to activate them.

Around the same time, project-wt.com started directing people to listen for something on a series of global radio stations, with broadcasts. Starting on June 8, a series of radio stations all aired a radio spot declaring, “We are the mystery hiding in plain sight. You will find us. This broadcast is the first clue.” As with the cassette tapes, examining the commercial’s spectrogram led to a website that would serve as the hub for the alternate reality game, WakingTitan.com.

Future radio spots introduced a series of fictional companies. Echo Software is a company that specializes in bringing back voices of the dead using home video recordings as source material. Multiverse Technologies focuses on topological mapping technologies. Myriad provides satellite-based storage solutions, while Superlumina specializes in temporal communications, sending messages through the past.

Exactly how these companies fit together is a mystery, but poring through the websites has slowly revealed a loose web of connections tying the four companies together.

HAM Radio Enthusiasts and Regularly Scheduled Programming
The Waking Titan website itself is deceptively simple: it features six triangular sigils arranged in a hexagon along with a series of sixteen glyphs lined up along the bottom of the screen. Solve a sigil, unlock a garbled message and the next sigil in the sequence, along with information on where and when to listen for the next radio ad. Solving glyphs doesn’t currently do anything beyond changing the glyph’s color from white to red, but additional puzzles on the assorted websites will often unlock PDFs of internal communications between the various companies.